Sidney Sanders McMath

In early 1946, McMath and other veterans returning from World War II banded together to fight corruption in the Hot Springs city government, which was dominated by illegal gambling interests. Hot Springs at the time was a national gambling mecca frequented by organized crime figures from Chicago, New York City, and other metropolitan areas. Casinos flourished and hotels advertised the availability of prostitutes. Mobsters maintained political control by purchasing and holding hundreds of poll tax receipts, often in the names of deceased or fictitious persons, which would be used to cast multiple votes in different precincts. Law enforcement officers were on the payroll of the local "organization" headed by long-serving Mayor Leo McLaughlin. A former sheriff who attempted to have the state's anti-gambling laws enforced was murdered in 1937; no one was ever charged with the killing. McMath headed a "GI Ticket", which, except for McMath himself, was defeated in the Democratic primary election. However, the others resigned from the party and ran again as independents in the 1946 general election after McMath persuaded a federal judge to toss out the fraudulent poll tax receipts. Most won their offices. Among them were noted combat aviators Earl Ricks and I.G. Brown who were elected mayor and sheriff, respectively.

McMath served as prosecuting attorney for the 18th Judicial District (Garland and Montgomery Counties) starting in 1947. The newly installed GI officials, led by McMath, shut down the casinos and other rackets and a grand jury indicted a number of owners, pitchmen and politicians, including the former mayor. With the development of Las Vegas in the years afterward, Hot Springs lost its premier gaming status. A casino revival during the administration of Governor Orval Faubus (1955–1967) was ended in 1967 by Republican Governor Winthrop Rockefeller (1967–1971).

McMath opposed the "Southern Manifesto", a March 1956 pronouncement of 19 U.S. Senators, including Fulbright and McClellan, and 81 Congressmen from former Confederate states decrying the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as: "[C]ontrary to the Constitution … creating chaos and confusion … destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races … plant[ing] hatred and suspicion [and an] explosive and dangerous condition [which is being] inflamed by outside meddlers …" The document encouraged public officials to use "all lawful means" to thwart the enforcement of the ruling. According to McMath at the time, "This [manifesto] only serves to encourage demagogues to set fires of racial hatred that could consume our people."

It was this Congressional manifesto, McMath laments in his autobiography, Promises Kept, that gave Faubus the impetus and political cover to call out the National Guard in September 1957 to bar the entry of nine black students to Little Rock Central High School. "Emboldened by this support", McMath wrote, "Faubus played his racial card." McMath strenuously opposed this action as well as Faubus' closure of the public schools the following year rather than obey federal court desegregation orders.

McMath counseled President Dwight D. Eisenhower against the use of regular U.S. Army troops, suggesting instead that the U.S. Marshals' service be used to enforce the court's orders. However, this advice was not accepted and paratroopers from the elite 101st Airborne Division were sent to Little Rock after Eisenhower nationalized the Guard and disbanded it. The soldiers forced the admission of "The Little Rock Nine", as the black students became known, but the troops' presence, as McMath foretold, stirred states-rights sentiment to a frenzy, made Faubus a hero to a majority of Arkansas voters, and ensured his re-election to a record six terms in office – each time, ironically, with an increasing percentage of the African-American vote, of which he garnered more than 80% in the 1964 Democratic primary.

McMath became the acknowledged leader of the Faubus opposition and supported insurgent gubernatorial candidates in the 1958 and 1960 Democratic primaries. His law firm was often referred to as resembling "a South American government in exile." McMath, himself, finally ran against Faubus in 1962 under the slogan, "Let's get Arkansas Moving Again." He placed second in a field of five, splitting the black vote with Faubus, while running on a platform of fresh business investment (many firms had fled the state during the years of racial strife or avoided it altogether), stricter regulation of gas and electric utility pricing, and the charging of interest on state revenues, which were held in private banks interest free but which the banks then loaned out at standard commercial rates - a windfall bankers justified as a "fee" for keeping the state's funds. Faubus narrowly avoided a runoff when Marvin Melton, a Jonesboro banker widely seen as the second strongest challenger after McMath, was persuaded by Faubus operatives (who suggested that state funds could be withdrawn from his bank and questions raised about his selling of allegedly inflated insurance company stock) to quit the race.